Cultivating a growth mindset

20 Aug 2018

Editorial featured SP’s senior engineering lecturer, Mr Teo Shin Jen, who is also an SP alumnus. Mr Teo, who has been teaching in SP for 11 years, came up and implemented a three-step instructional framework, called TCM, at the faculty. The TCM framework stands for Teach, Coach and Mentor, and is a testament to his commitment to lifelong learning. Mr Teo keeps himself abreast with advancements in the engineering sector by attending conferences both online and in person. He also participates in hackathons and constantly experiments with new technologies with his students. SP student Nikhil Raghavendr shared that his interest in engineering was piqued by Mr Teo’s constant drive to create useful things by splicing commonly-found components and consumables together. One of the project that Nikhil completed under Mr Teo’s tutorage is the design of an AI agent, which was featured on artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s website. That put him at the top of the global leaderboard for two days. But Nikhil shared that his greatest success to date is being part of the group from SP that beat 16 other Singaporean teams to clinch the top spot in the Bosch Ville Hackathon 2018. The team conceptualised and built an urban agricultural toolkit that included sensors, machine learning and cloud computing to help farmers grow their crops more productively. He added that the secret behind their success is documentation, an invaluable habit he picked up from Mr Teo. 
[The New Paper, online]